A bad week for screenwriters

Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront) and Blake Snyder (Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot) were very different writers, but each was a craftsman with a family history in showbiz. (Schulberg was the son of a studio head; Snyder did voice work as a child for his father’s Roger Ramjet cartoons.)

For what it’s worth, my favorite Schulberg book is The Disenchanted, a roman à clef based on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Schulberg himself. Among other great bits, there’s an amazing drunken stream-of-consciousness “appreciation” of Charlie Chaplin’s man-child film persona by the Fitzgerald character. (Ironically, the novel plays out rather like Chaplin’s own later film Limelight.)

Blake Snyder was more famous for being a how-to guru than a screenwriter; his books (Save the Cat! and Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies) emphasize commercially-viable, Hollywood-style projects. Unlike most Hollywood gurus, though, he actually had multiple real film credits, and wasn’t automatically dismissed by working writers: both John Rogers (Leverage) and Alex Epstein (Bon Cop / Bad Cop) thought he was on to something. (Plus, you know, Snyder never named names to HUAC. That might matter to some people.)

Update: Damn. John Hughes as well. (And I know it’s horribly cynical of me, but I wonder when the backlash will begin at how much more attention this death gets, especially online, than the “worthier” Schulberg’s death does.)